Monday, March 21, 2011

While Cloud Computing is all the rage these days, most enterprises are wary of putting their sensitive or confidential data on an internet accessible cloud. So how do you take advantage of Cloud Computing and reap its benefits while still keeping your valuable data protected in a secure vault-like environment that you've built over the years in your enterprise data-centers?

That's where Private Clouds come in, enabling your Enterprise IT department to take the efficiency of your in-house data-centers resources to new levels and delivers IT infrastructure (server, networking and storage) and possibly even enterprise middleware as on-demand services.

A key component of a private cloud is a workload deployer that can provision these resources as virtual machines on-the-fly with custom configurations as and when required by project leads in the various lines of business.

As far as private cloud workload deployers are concerned, IBM WebSphere Cloudburst Appliance (WCA) requires a special mention because it comes preloaded with variety of middleware for provisioning enterprise-class applications. The software comes bundled in what are called Hypervisor Editions, which are essentially virtual images based on VMware ESX (for Linux and Windows) or PowerVM (AIX). These images however can be launched with custom parameters and options and can be configured to connect with other middleware to create complete enterprise application environments with web, app, and database servers.

Preloaded middleware includes WebSphere Application Server and DB2 database server. DB2 is a highly available and secure database management system that leading enterprises all over the world are using for their most mission critical needs. And DB2 pureScale is a highly scalable and continuously available edition of DB2 that can cluster dozens of servers for extreme demand workloads.

I will likely do future posts to delve into greater details about various items introduced in this post, however in the interim you can learn more about Hypervisor Editions, and WebSphere Cloudburst Appliance, and watch this demo to see how you use WCA to do pattern based workload deployments to provision application and database servers in your private cloud: